This article takes a closer look at PowerGUI, vEcoshell (VESI), PowerCLI and ESXi.

PowerGUI and VESI

PowerGUI is a free tool from Quest Software that does what it’s name suggests — it provides a GUI interface to Microsoft’s PowerShell automation framework/scripting interface. It’s a visual shell of sorts for Powershell. You can create a combination of queries and actions and then either run them from the GUI, or switch over to the “script” tab and see your actions in Powershell script format. Now while there were VMWare powerpacks available for PowerGUI they only went so far. Vizioncore (now Quest) developed a more robust GUI specifically for VMware environments (Hyper-V support was later added) called vEcoshell.

The bad news is that vEcoshell is no longer being developed, but the good news is that this development has moved to PowerGUI in the form of a PowerPack. If you download the current version of PowerGUI and then the VMWare PowerPack, you will have the same functionality that vEcoshell was intended to provide. Quest is also leveraging this in their products, such as vRanger Pro 5.0 which will ship with a PowerGUI powerpack to open up new possibilities for managing backup and replication tasks.